Bbenzon
Description
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 7356 )
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Hoboken Street Lamps (& the Sun)
Posted on 26 March 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Homo Economicus Sucks! Homo Ludens Rocks!
Here's what Wikipedia says about Homo economicus: The term Homo economicus, or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational... Read more
Posted on 26 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rick Beato Interviews Mohini Day, an Insanely Excellent Bass Player from Kolkata
From her Wikipedia entry: Dey was born and brought up in Mumbai. When she was born, her parents were struggling to make ends meet, as her father worked as a... Read more
Posted on 26 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Which Do Major American Universities Value More, Freedom of Inquiry and Free...
Charlie Eaton, $15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President, NYTimes, March 25, 2025. President Trump has declared that this country’s leading universities are... Read more
Posted on 25 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Areas with Higher Adoption of Google Translate Experienced a Decline in...
Carl Benedikt Frey Pedro Llanos-Paredes, Lost in translation: AI’s impact on translators and foreign language skills, VoxEU. 22 march 2025 . Read more
Posted on 25 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Can Scholarly Pirate Libraries Bridge the Knowledge Access Gap?
Bod贸 B, Antal D, Puha Z (2020) Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book... Read more
Posted on 25 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More About Those Pyramids
Yesterday I published excerpts from an article in The Jerusalem Post about recent discoveries that may upend what we know about the pyramids at Giza. That... Read more
Posted on 25 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Lessons in Laughter
: Dozens of you have shared this lovely video with me over the past couple days. And I just love that it illustrates two baby lessons in one. Read more
Posted on 24 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Delirous with Daffodils
Posted on 24 March 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What's Up, Umm, Err, Down with the Pyramids? [“a Vast Underground City”?]
The Egyptian pyramids have been a scientific, historical, and mythological (if you will) puzzle since whenever. What are the for and how were they built? On... Read more
Posted on 24 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
David Hays, Language and Love + Leslie Farber [why Techbros Are Dangerous]
I first learned of David Hays, who would become my teacher, mentor, and colleague, from an article he published in Dædalus (Vol. 102, No. 2, 1973):... Read more
Posted on 23 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Odd Angles
Posted on 23 March 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Demise of White Male Writer of Literary Fiction?
Over at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen has posted the opening paragraphs of Jacob Savage, The Vanishing White Male Writer, Compact (Mar. Read more
Posted on 23 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken After Dark
Posted on 22 March 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Hippocampus and Language: A Conversation with Claude 3.7
I recently had a conversation with Claude 3.7 Sonnet about the functions that that hippocampus plays in language. As I lay down some basic information about... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Linguistic Capacity Present in Homo Sapiens 135 Thousand Years Ago
Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto, Remo Nitschke,, Mercedes Okumura, Ian TattersallI, Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: A Selection of Recent Shots
Posted on 21 March 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What's Going on Inside So-called "reasoning Model" LLMs
Melanie Mitchell has an interesting piece up: Artificial intelligence learns to reason, Science, 20 Mar 2025, Vol 387, Issue 6740, DOI: 10.1126/science. Read more
Posted on 21 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Quantifying Emergent Complexity at Different Scales
Erik Hoel, Causal Emergence 2.0: Quantifying emergent complexity, arXiv:2503.13395v1 [cs.IT] 17 Mar 2025 Abstract: Complex systems can be described at myriad... Read more
Posted on 21 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Remarkable Karolina Protsenko
This video comes with this notice: “Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.” I don't know about the videos, but the voice sounds... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
